Explorations in Transactional Psychology

Explorations in Transactional Psychology

Explorations in Transactional Psychology

Excerpt

What do we mean by "transactional psychology"? While the burden of this volume is to clarify what this particular abstraction refers to, it may be helpful here if we briefly describe the theme song running through the various chapters.

The fact that we see a chair, and then are able to go to the place at which we localize it and rest our bodies on a substantial object, does not at first glance appear to present a psychological problem. However, the problem is there, and it is not a superficial one. In any philosophy or comprehensive theory of psychology, of science, or of knowledge in general, some answer to this problem is implicit. In our present age the statement that we can never be aware of the world as such, but only of the nervous impulses arising from the impingement of physical forces on the sensory receptors, meets with rather easy acceptance. Once this is accepted, however, one immediately faces the necessity of explaining the correspondence between what is perceived and what is there.

An extremely logical, unbeatable, and scientifically useless answer is simply to say that there is no externality; that everything exists in the . . .